Eric Powell and Harold Schechter on DR. WERTHLESS: The Man Who Studied Murder - Dark Horse Comics 

With just the two names involved I’m in!

"All we did was run around and shoot each other. It didn't do us...well..." While it is true that Wertham held what could be considered Utopian ambitions it was less that he believed humans were not innately violent and more that he felt that it was possible to irradicate violence as a common human trait. He concluded that in order to do so we'd have to stop celebrating and glorifying it in our entertainment. He did not contend that violent comics were the sole cause of juvenile delinquency, as is often assumed by most, but instead were one of many contributing factors in youth violence. He didn't believe that crime was monocausal but understood that the varying root causes would have to be tackled individually, and he chose to focus on media. While violent content was one of Wertham's targets, he specifically went after comics, and mass media in general, because they were a delivery system that he felt had a strong impact on people's psyches. Mass media has radically altered the way humans behave, as Marshall McLuhan and many others have postulated since the middle of the 20th century, so to argue that comics weren't having some effect on children is unrealistic. That's not to say all children will become raving lunatics because they read a comic or watch a movie, but we are shaped to varying degrees by pervasive culture. Mr. Schechter gets a little tongue tied when talking about the gun violence that the early TV generation grew up with and implies that all the kids watching The Riflemen became peaceniks but chooses to not carry that forward into the 21st Century when gun violence is a top cause of death among children in the United States, although I would guess his mind was heading in that direction. In terms of the Shakespeare argument, Wertham addressed that very idea by pointing out that children, if they had any interest in Shakespeare at all, would maybe see or read a few of his plays in a one-off fashion whereas comics were something millions of children collected and read repeatedly. If a child did see a performance of Macbeth, it was a singular experience while the consumption of comics was a daily activity for a large percentage of kids in the U.S.. I don't see the point of stating that there's always been a precedence for violent content in entertainment as an argument against Wertham's views. His argument against that would be that viruses have always existed, yet we've found ways of combatting them with vaccines and hygiene. He also maintained, for instance, that for centuries humans engaged in incest, yet society collectively resolved to make that an extremely shameful taboo and there was reason to think that the same could be done with violence. Obviously, that's a naive take on Wertham's part - we embrace violence to an incredible degree - and the fact of the matter is that Wertham lost his battle. By the time underground comix arrived in the late 60's everything that he'd rallied against was on full display in comic books that avoided the comics code through alternate distribution. The fact that comics fans still demonize Wertham in the year 2024 is silly to me (see the Cartoonist Kayfabe "F@$K WERTHAM" t-shirt) because all you have to do is pick up a random issue of Walking Dead or Saga and you can see that the most popular comics being sold today contain everything Wertham and all the other post WWII anti-comics crusaders were fighting against. The vulgarians and gorehounds won. I'm glad to hear Schecter allowing Wertham some grace for his desire to help children lead a mentally healthy life. However, his assertion that society benefits from indulging in vicarious acts of violence is as potentially spurious as the idea that violent media causes violent behavior. There's no empirical proof for either theory.